Object detection, specifically face detection, is currently used, for example, in Biometrics and facial identification solutions in law enforcement, airports, and customs and immigration, driver's license, passport and other government agencies. The goal of face detection is to identify all image regions which contain a face regardless of its three-dimensional position, orientation, and lighting conditions. Such a goal is challenging because faces are non-rigid and have a high degree of variability in size, shape, color and texture.
The problem associated, in particular, with frontal, up-right human face detection by computers has existed for more than 30 years. Known methods of facial detection are summarized into four major groups. Knowledge-based methods are rule-based methods that encode human knowledge of what constitutes a typical face. Usually, the rules capture the relationships between facial features. One example of a knowledge-based method is described in G. Yang and T. S. Huang, “Human Face Detection in Complex Background,” Pattern Recognition, vol. 27, no. 1, pp, 53-63, 1994.
Feature invariant approaches use algorithms to find structural features that exist even when the pose, viewpoint, or lighting conditions vary, and then use these to locate faces. Examples of these approaches can be found in T. K. Leung, M. C. Burl, and P. Perona, “Finding Faces in Cluttered Scenes Using Random Labeled Graph Matching,” Proc. Fifth IEEE Int'l Conf. Computer Vision, pp. 637-644, 1995; and J. Yang and A Waibel, “A Real-Time Face Tracker,” Proc. Third Workshop Applications of Computer Vision, pp. 142-147, 1996.
In template matching methods, several standard patterns of a face are stored to describe the face as a whole or the facial features separately. The correlations between an input image and the stored patterns are computed for detection. Examples of these methods are in K. C. Yow and R. Cipolla, “Feature-Based Human Face Detection,” Image and Vision Computing˜vol. 15, no. 9, pp. 713-735, 1997; and I. Craw, D. Tock and A. Bennett, “Finding Face Features,” Proc. Second European Conf. Computer Vision, pp. 92-96, 1992.
In appearance based methods, in contrast to template matching, the models (or templates) are learned from a set of training images which capture the representative variability facial. These learned models are then used for detection. Examples of these methods include M. Turk and A. Pentland, “Eigenfaces for Recognition,” J. Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 71-86, 1991; and A. J. Colmenarez and T. S. Huang, “Face detection with information-based maximum discrimination,” Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1997 Proceedings, 1997 IEEE Computer Society Conference on, 17-19 June 1997, Pages 782-787.